Manny's Lament
by Gypsy Love
Summary: Manny remembers all the heartache with Craig over the years and talks about how she moved on.


Okay, I don't have any coffee. That shouldn't matter. But it does, I need my little pick-me-ups. It's just that, sometimes, I remember that whole thing from last year, and the year before, and the one before that. It's Craig. He's been a part of my mind and my thoughts and my life for so long. Now I'm done with him, I am done with him. I have to be. It wasn't ever healthy. Not ever. Not from the moment I'd met him and I just felt all the oxygen being sucked out of the room.

Okay, I've moved on. I can do that. It's not so hard because I am so angry with him, for every slight. None of them have got by me. I've catalogued all these hurts, all this exquisite pain he has caused. All the way back to eighth grade and that date and granted, I was a kid. I was 13! Still a kid, but the way I loved him even then wasn't at all like a kid. It was hard to walk around with this mature love and still be only 13. So after, at his locker, and his face, I could see that something was so wrong. But I didn't want to believe that my glittering fantasy wasn't coming true. I had so many illusions. He shattered them all.

Fine. That really should have been that but could I let it go? Could I let him go? No. No, of course not. Ninth grade and he was in 10th grade and dating _Ashley_ and still I wanted him, I loved him. I heard that song he sang to her in the gym, so honest and raw and I knew he loved her he fucking loved her but I still, I had to have him. So I got him. I was at Paige's party and saw that Ashley was mad about something, saw them leave and then he came back all mad. So mad. His shoulders all hunched up and he walked fast and I saw my chance. So I chased him and I caught him and I went back to his garage that night and told him that Ashley couldn't see what she had and didn't deserve it. I could see.

That was a strange time. I knew he was seeing Ashley, he kept telling me. 'I've got a girlfriend,' he'd say, but he still danced so close to me and kissed me and had sex with me. And Ashley was demanding too much, trying to force things from him he couldn't give her. I didn't want to force anything. I accepted things. I understood certain aspects of his psyche somehow. Emma told me all that went on that night he ran away, what his father did and how he was damaged from that.

But then, that day at the ice skating rink when he came and told me it was me, 'it's you, it's always been you,' he said, and I just…I was so completely happy. I felt like life finally made sense, that this person who I had longed for and loved without reason, that this person finally loved me back with the intensity that I felt…it was just indescribable. Of course it was so short lived. On the ice skating rink that day I felt like it would be forever. That now nothing could separate us. But it was so fleeting. He was still seeing Ashley. He was lying. The day of that play at school, it was like the photo negative of the ice skating rink day. Everything was inversed. Black was white. My heart physically hurt.

And of course the ultimate hurt, Maude. That is, was, that pregnancy and his weird reaction and how he was all over me then but just for the kid. Just for the replacement family he was looking for. Spinner told me about their conversation from that time, how Spin had demanded to know what in the hell Craig was thinking. And Craig had told him, this darkness in his eyes, 'you have a family. Me? I just stay at some guy's house. But Manny and the baby, they're mine. They're for me,'

10th grade? The abortion sort of scarred both of us, I guess. I could barely look at him that year. I knew he was going crazy. I mean, I observed things from a distance. I saw the strange behavior, the outbursts, and I heard about the thing with Joey and stealing credit cards and wrecking gay weddings. But I was removed from him that year. Still, I felt bad for him. Wondered how much his father was involved in his mental break. Maybe his father was bipolar, too. Maybe all the beatings sort of triggered it or something. I didn't know and wasn't giving it all that much thought. But then, after he was in the hospital and back at school, and there was this new sort of medicated calmness about him, he came over to me. Held my wrists and I felt like a trapped bird, 'let me go,' I thought at him. Let me go.

He did this strange thing then. This horrible apology but it was the worst thing anyone had ever said to me. I looked at him with this sort of incredulous anger. He said basically that the thing he regretted most about high school or last year or however he worded it, he said the thing he regretted most was me. And when he said that it just felt so…so exquisitely bad. It was this glassy, unreal pain. I didn't regret him, I didn't think. I'd loved him and in fact loved him still despite the pain. But the thing that got me was that he was trying to be nice, in a weird way. Trying to acknowledge his role in the disaster, I suppose.

11th grade. That was just kind of mellow. We got back together but I wondered, in a way, how much of it was simply because Ashley was gone. I wondered if I was a second choice. But I didn't think that very often, tried not to. He left that year and it was almost inevitable that he would. I couldn't keep him there, couldn't trap him. He was on his own path and I had to let him go, reverted back to my fantasy that we were soul mates or something. I made excuses for him, for why he wasn't calling, and why I felt…I don't know. I felt like I didn't matter to him again but I knew he mattered to me and I felt stupid. Sometimes, in these moments of real honesty with myself, which believe me were few and far between, I'd say, 'Girl, what is wrong with you? How long are you going to be his…his little puppet or something?' Oh, yeah, I felt the strings, baby. But I needed them, was comforted by them somehow.

And here we are. 12th grade. And he came back for the little music festival and I was so excited to see him but sort of scared. He'd been gone so long, maybe things had changed. Maybe the puppet strings were cut. Maybe I'd be alone. Well, alone didn't really matter. Maybe I wouldn't have him anymore. Craig. That's what mattered. But it was sort of okay. When I saw him at the airport, walking toward me with those rock star sunglasses on and his guitar over his shoulder I felt the same way I'd always felt, the same way I felt when he got out of his father's car on the first day of eighth grade. The very same. And I could sink inside that feeling somehow and feel the comfortable weight of the puppet strings controlling my every move.

That was the most difficult time by far. Worse than Maude, worse than him lying and cheating, worse than when he said it wasn't the locker he didn't like it was me he didn't like, worse, worse. Because I felt a connection with him, felt it was strengthened by our time apart, damn it. So I go back stage and I see him doing coke and I…I don't know. Maybe I'm a child. Maybe I knew that Craig couldn't handle it, because he couldn't handle anything. I knew drugs weren't for him, I mean…I knew. And I tried it, too. It was stupid, I knew it as I was forcing him to let me try it. But how hard do you have to force a drug addict to do drugs? Not very hard. His protests were weak. He wasn't thinking about me or what was good for me or what would hurt me. He never did, come to think of it.

Then he chose the drugs over me. He did, up in the spare bedroom at Marco's, and then that was it. All of it, the five years of him using me and being so careless of every delicate feeling I've ever had, of him being so breathtakingly thoughtless all the time, it was enough. I cut the damn puppet strings myself. It hurt me to do it, to leave him. To see those round eyes with the surprise, the beginnings of the hurt. I'd always been able to feel what he feels just by looking at him but I realized he didn't do the same for me. He never felt what I felt or he would have seen a long time ago just how much he has hurt me.

I didn't think about him for a long time, I got wrapped up in other things. In Darcy, that was an easy out. Darcy started to fall apart right before my very eyes and I tried to help, sort of. And the Lakehurst drama. And that guy I dated when my hair was crazy blond. All diversions from Craig, so I wouldn't think about him and cry about him and think about him being in rehab. The part of me that loved him was deep down now, and I was suffocating it, never letting it breathe. But it didn't need to breathe. I think that part of me that loves him is like a virus, not really alive but not dead, able to lie dormant for decades until it has some cell to feed on. To exist in. My love for Craig is a vampire, dark sucking night creature that takes and takes and never gives and never dies.

And then Jay. Jay? C'mon. I lectured Emma against him when she was giving him blow jobs, because he was sleazy and using her and all of that. She was better than him. And I used him just to bug my dad and then to get a little freedom, I was using him. But then, I don't know. In that thoughtlessness and that disregard for people and things that he had I started to see something else. It started to seem that he had my best interests at heart. That he cared about me. And I noticed how this was in opposition to Craig. Craig seemed like he cared about people, like he had cared about me. But he never did anything that proved it, but Jay did. Jay chased me all the way to that college to switch the tapes, to get me that audition that I wanted, needed to have. It wasn't like it was with Craig, some kind of love at first sight. But Jay gradually got into my heart, it was different. I felt more on equal footing with him, not like I was looking up the way I felt with Craig. Jay was more honest, too. When he was being a dick you knew it. Not Craig, boy. It took months for me to figure out just what a dick he was. Years.

We went to that concert at the college, me and Liberty and Emma and Ashley and Jay. Nice. Some music and I got my audition and life was good, and then what do I hear over the microphone? Craig Manning. My heart just sunk inside my chest. I didn't want to but my eyes were dragged to the stage, and there he was, smiling, his stage presence thing. I've seen him on so many stages. At Degrassi. At the sound showcases. At the coffee houses. Now here. I looked up at him and he didn't see me. He brought Ashley up onstage with him and it didn't hurt me. I looked at Jay and felt that flutter and I didn't care that Craig was up on stage. I didn't care at all.


End file.
